An Hour of Who a Day

March 24: "Turn Left"

Having given us the "companion-lite" episode last time, this time we get the "Doctor-lite" episode. "Turn Left" provides us with an interesting thought experiment: if Donna had never met the Doctor in "The Runaway Bride", how would things have turned out differently? Quite a bit, the answer turns out.

There's no question that life is a lot worse without the Doctor around (his having died during the events of "The Runaway Bride"), but Russell T Davies seems to take some delight in showing us just bad things would get. And so we get both Martha Jones and Sarah Jane and her gang killed during the events of "Smith and Jones" (with Sarah Jane being the one responsible for stopping the Plasmavore's super-charged MRI scheme; intriguingly this suggests that Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria, and Clyde were all present during the events of "Smith and Jones", and that they simply never crossed paths with the Doctor), the starship Titanic crashing into Buckingham Palace and irradiating southern England, half of America converted into Adipose, and Torchwood sacrificing themselves to stop the Sontaran plot to turn Earth into a breeding world. Each event makes life worse and worse for the Noble family, but what's most interesting is how Davies has some people making the best of it (such as Rocco Colasanto and his family), even when things turn really nasty with the "England for the English" policy. Donna, meanwhile, has grown up, albeit in a different way from when she met the Doctor. There, she had her eyes opened; here, she's just had to hunker down and try to make the best of things, even when there's no realistic way to make that happen.

Rose talks to Donna as Donna prepares to travel back in time.
("Turn Left") ©BBC

But even though we don't have the Doctor around, we still need a Doctor figure, which is where Rose Tyler comes in. After having been making quick cameos here and there throughout series 4 (mostly on monitor screens that the Doctor isn't looking at), she finally appears here to help guide Donna toward the right path, the one that will set the universe back on track. She's incredibly Doctor-ish in her dialogue here, which is actually something of a hindrance -- Rose (or possibly Billie Piper) frequently sounds like she doesn't quite believe what she's saying, and it weakens these scenes as a result. Rose is best when she's empathizing with Donna, not when she has to deliver technobabble.

This is definitely a dark episode, and it's interesting to see just how bad things can get when humanity has to rely on each other instead of the Doctor. But while it's put together really well and does all the things a story like this should do, I find that "Turn Left" is, for me at least, an easy story to admire but a hard story to actually enjoy. Maybe that's because it's ultimately a bleak look into an alternate history, with little to redeem things here. But still, it's a story worth doing, and as a way to define the Doctor by his absence, it would be hard to do better than this.

March 23: "Midnight"

As you've no doubt realized (if you've been following along with this blog), one of the things that has given Doctor Who such longevity is its versatility, its ability to be just about any sort of story you want it to be. That's why the show can be a surreal children's nightmare, then a comedy Western, and then a contemporary thriller -- and that's just three consecutive stories from season 3.

Part of the way Doctor Who is so versatile is by taking other genres of stories and then inserting the Doctor, to see what happens. Invariably, the presence of the Doctor serves to distort the story, to send it off in a new direction by virtue of his being there. Take a story like Pyramids of Mars, which should be a story about an ancient Egyptian god returning to unleash his vengeance upon the planet -- except the Doctor turns up and starts asking questions about Sutekh's origins and intentions. Or Vengeance on Varos, which is a nasty violent dystopian tale of the sort popular in the early/mid '80s -- but then the Doctor arrives, gets most everyone except the villains on his side, and turns the whole thing into a critique of the genre. The point is that the presence of the Doctor distorts stories -- he gets people on his side via his personality and confidence and sends stories off in a new direction as a result.

Why bring this up? Because "Midnight" is the one story where this doesn't happen.

You can see it almost start to happen; it starts out as a tense "possession" thriller, but because the Doctor is there things can go in a different direction. He has experience with this sort of thing, after all. He almost calms everyone down, but then the hostess advocates throwing the possessed Sky out of the broken-down shuttle and things start to spiral out of control. Instead of the Doctor being listened to as the voice of reason, the others turn on him in their hysteria, demanding an accounting of him that he's unable to satisfactorily give. Instead of distorting the story, he's subsumed by it, unable to affect the changes he normally would; he's now a victim like everyone else.

The others watch as the Doctor examines the possessed Sky.
("Midnight") ©BBC

This would be a terrifying move even if "Midnight" weren't so well directed, but director Alice Troughton (no relation) does an outstanding job of laying the tension on thick, with odd angles and cuts and lighting choices all combining to create a genuinely scary experience. We also get a superb cast, including David Troughton (Patrick Troughton's son, last seen on the show in The Curse of Peladon) as Professor Hobbes, Colin Morgan (soon to be the main character on Merlin) as Jethro, and Lesley Sharp (from a number of earlier RTD productions) as Sky. This is a very strong cast, but it might be Lesley Sharp who stands out the most as the possessed Sky. Russell T Davies takes the simple childhood annoyance of repeating what someone says and turns it into something scary, and Lesley Sharp absolutely delivers in her performance -- even David Tennant can't quite match it when it's his turn to play possessed, and he's hardly a slouch in this.

The end result is an episode that gets tenser and more claustrophobic until it approaches breaking point, and the Doctor is powerless to do anything about it. No one on the shuttle is a bad person -- the scenes at the beginnings show that these are all "normal" people -- but when they're thrust into this situation their worst nature comes out and they're unable to rise above it. Once again we see that humanity's worst enemy is itself, and it's only the actions of the hostess (who no one knew the name of) that stops the others from murdering an innocent man and inadvertently letting this strange creature go free. "Midnight" is a powerful, extremely well-crafted story -- even if the points it raises makes it one of the most depressing stories the series has ever done -- and one of the best stories the show has ever done.

March 22: "Forest of the Dead"

We open with Donna adjusting to a different life, one that seems to jump in time like a dream, but with Doctor Moon helping her. "And then you remembered," he tells her each time she notices one of the jumps. This new life is set on (roughly) 21st-century Earth, which is why the girl we saw last time was in that same time period. Donna seems almost fully "integrated" into this life when glitches start appearing -- such as the Doctor in place of Doctor Moon, or a strange woman dressed all in black, leaving her cryptic notes. Donna has already started to work out that something is wrong, but that woman (the data ghost of Miss Evangelista) confirms it for her, even though she doesn't want to believe it. These scenes are directed well -- I really like the edits as time jumps -- and have some imaginative moments, like when we see that all the children playing on the playground are copies of the same two kids, but I think my favorite part is Murray Gold's score, which plays some of the score backwards to really reinforce the sense that something's wrong. It's a great touch.

"Forest of the Dead" isn't quite as tense and scary as "Silence in the Library" was, but that's because it's more concerned with action and explanation than simply establishing the mood. The reason the Vashta Nerada appeared in such large numbers in the Library is a clever moment, and the way the Doctor achieves a temporary truce with them at the end ("I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up") works a lot better than it has any right to. And there's still lots of running up and down corridors and dodging shadows and moving spacesuits full of Vashta Nerada, so it's not like it's completely action-free -- it's just that we get a couple moments where the Doctor actually confronts the Vashta Nerada for explanations.

River Song prepares to sacrifice herself to save everyone else.
("Forest of the Dead") ©BBC

But it's not just them we're getting explanations from; we also learn what CAL is and why Lux is so determined to protect his secrets -- it's not because of a patent, it's so that his aunt isn't turned into a freak show. "This is only half a life, of course," Lux says. "But it's forever." It's a surprisingly sweet moment from a character who, up to this point, had only been something of an irritation, and it does make us revise our opinion of him. CAL had saved everyone in the library from the Vashta Nerada, but now something's gone wrong and the place is going to self-destruct. This is where we see River sacrifice herself to save everyone, in what's a surprisingly distressing moment (surprising because we've really only just met River). "Funny thing is, this means you've always known how I was going to die," River tells the Doctor, who's handcuffed and unable to intervene. "All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here." It's a rather tragic idea but a interesting one as well, to learn that the Doctor has (almost) always known how River would die, every time he sees her. This also gives them a chance to have a sad ending, as the Doctor has lost River and Donna lost her husband in the computer world. "Are you all right?" Donna asks him. "I'm always all right," the Doctor responds, echoing what he said at the end of "The Girl in the Fireplace". But Donna sees through that immediately: "Is 'all right' special Time Lord code for really not all right at all? ... Because I'm all right, too."

But they also then have a chance to have a (somewhat) happy ending, as the Doctor realizes he gave River his screwdriver in his personal future to save River: there was a (presumably special) neural relay in the screwdriver to save River's consciousness. It's not a complete victory, because the Doctor can't bring her back into the real world, but it is something. And this is where it turns out that this story is doing cleverer things than you might initially realize. Because it is a little odd, having Charlotte Lux appear to be in contemporary times, but that's because the production team is trying to leave us with one last lingering question. We've seen Charlotte watching the Doctor's adventures on her television -- she's essentially watching Doctor Who, just like the viewers (and note how the incidental music changes with the images as she changes channels), except that at one point the Doctor starts addressing her directly from inside the television. River is now also in the computer, living her virtual life forever, and the final shot of the episode is of her directly addressing the audience: "Sweet dreams, everyone." Given that that's exactly what happened to Charlotte, the programme seems to be saying to us, can we really be sure we're not inside the Library computer too?

It's clever, it's fun, it's got great characters and direction... It's not as neatly packaged and presented as Steven Moffat's other stories thus far have been (where it's almost like solving a puzzle rather than experiencing a story), but that's actually one of the strengths of "Silence of the Library" / "Forest of the Dead". There's a sense of a universe beyond what we're shown -- this world doesn't end just because the story does, and that's a good quality to have. It's not as brilliant as "The Empty Child" / "The Doctor Dances" or "Blink", but there's a more subtle wonderfulness at work here. This is why this story is one of the most satisfying tales we've had in Doctor Who.

(This entry is dedicated to the memory of Chris Tremlett, a friend and Doctor Who fan who lost her battle with cancer earlier today. The universe is a little more sad and a little less mad without her.)

March 21: "Silence in the Library"

(In the interest of disclosure, it should be noted that "Silence in the Library" / "Forest of the Dead" is the story I wrote about for Outside In vol. 2 -- the only wrinkle being that, as of the time of writing, that book's not actually out yet (should be later this year!). Still, like Terror of the Zygons, I'll do my best not to cover the same ground here as in that, but some similarities will inevitably occur. So, with that said...)

The Doctor and the Lux expedition speak to the little girl
through her television. ("Silence in the Library") ©BBC

This starts with, seemingly, two storylines. The first involves a little girl (apparently in contemporary times, judging from the technology and surroundings) who imagines a giant library that she can explore -- only for the Doctor and Donna to suddenly appear inside her dreams. The second involves the Doctor and Donna heading to a planet-sized library at the behest of a mysterious note on the psychic paper, only to find the place completely abandoned. It's not immediately clear what the little girl's doing in this story (although the part with Doctor Moon near the end -- "The real world is a lie, and your nightmares are real; the Library is real" -- is a good clue), and, intriguingly, it isn't laid out for us immediately at the start. (Compare with, say, "The Doctor's Daughter", and note the difference.) This is a good move.

This episode is also really good at creating a creepy mood. We've had some creepy moods in Steven Moffat's previous efforts, but this one is wonderfully effective, as the Doctor explains to us reasons to be afraid of the dark beyond the "you can't tell what's hiding in the shadows" one -- it's not just what's concealed in the shadows, it's the shadows themselves. The Vashta Nerada -- literally (albeit in an unknown language) "the shadows that melt the flesh" -- lurk in the shadows and allegedly can be seen as dust motes in sunbeams. (Though presumably not all dust motes are Vashta Nerada.) It's a creepy idea that lends a nice sense of dread to the proceedings, as characters try not to have their shadows touch and an extra shadow means you're marked for death. (Creepy and easy to realize. Nice work, Moffat.) We also get some creepiness with the data ghosts, after Miss Evangelista is killed by the Vashta Nerada. Plus it gives us another catchphrase to scare people with: "Hey, who turned out the lights?"

Of course, I'm dancing around the big event in this episode: the introduction of Professor River Song. It's a really nice idea, having someone meet the Doctor out of sequence for him (i.e., from his future), that's somewhat surprisingly only really been explored once before, in 1989's Battlefield. It's used very effectively here, in the way that River is so comfortable with the Doctor and affectionate toward him, and the scene between the two where River tries to work out where they each are in their relationship, only to learn that this is the first time the Doctor has ever seen River, is really nice. "He hasn't met me yet," she tells Donna later. "I sent him a message, but it went wrong. It arrived too early. This is the Doctor in the days before he knew me. And he looks at me, he looks right through me and it shouldn't kill me, but it does." It's a great conceit that also serves a practical purpose: it means the expedition is willing to listen to the Doctor without too many "why should we pay any attention to you?" speeches.

So, a great start to this two-part story, with a creepy monster, a cool location (although, that said... there were only 4022 people in a planet-sized library the day it sealed itself off?), and a fascinating figure from the Doctor's future. So far this looks like another winner from Steven Moffat.

(Oh, and nice move in the "next time" trailer, not showing us any scenes with Donna after she's apparently "saved" by the little girl.)

March 20: "The Unicorn and the Wasp"

I dunno. I understand that "The Unicorn and the Wasp" wants to be silly and absurd and fun, without too much angst or drama getting in the way, while it pastiches the murder mysteries that Agatha Christie is famous for. I even think it does a good job with them. I just don't find it particularly funny.

The nice thing about this episode is that it imagines to be both a trip back to the 1920s, with some elements of flappers and large estates throwing parties thrown in just like we've seen on TV in other shows (or Black Orchid, if Doctor Who is the only thing you ever watch), and a loving tribute to Agatha Christie's novels (along with some of the dafter installments of the Doctor Who strip that TV Comic put out in the 1960s, in case you're wondering what giant wasps have to do with Roaring '20s England). We also get Felicity Kendal, Christopher Benjamin, and Fenella Woolgar, and a host of other actors who've been in period pieces like this before, so they hardly put a foot wrong as they go through this unusual murder mystery. And it is a lot like an Agatha Christie mystery -- deliberately, we later learn -- with guests being bumped off in isolated circumstances and everyone keeping secrets from each other.

The Doctor faces the Vespiform. ("The Unicorn and the
Wasp") ©BBC

The culprit of this mystery, however, is an alien wasp called a Vespiform which can take human form, and which formed a psychic link with its human mother while she was reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It's an odd and silly idea, but as it's deliberately designed to be absurd it's hard to be mad at it. Plus they do a nice job with their CGI wasp -- the Mill certainly have come along since "The Lazarus Experiment".

But for me, at least, it never fully coheres into a unified story. There are definitely funny moments (Colonel Curbishly admitting he's not crippled is a good one, but I also really like the moment where the Doctor chases the Vespiform down a hallway: "There's nowhere to run! Show yourself!" the Doctor cries, only for six people to emerge from various doorways), but they never feel like they're part of the main event -- rather, it's like an interlude before we get back to the main plot. (It doesn't help that a couple of the jokes -- like Donna giving Christie ideas -- were used before in Roberts' last Who script.) And by necessity, the resolution has to be more serious in nature, which does weaken the more good-naturedly silly bits.

I know a number of people who quite adore "The Unicorn and the Wasp", and while I can admire what it's trying to do, it just doesn't come together for me the way it should. For me, it tends to look a lot like someone trying to be clever and not quite pulling it off. You can applaud the attempt, but you wish it had gone better.

March 19: "The Doctor's Daughter"

Oh, what a letdown. That fun build-up at the end of last episode is completely squandered before the credits even roll here, and we learn Jenny is the Doctor's daughter by way of technobabble rather than anything more meaningful or interesting.

The last time Stephen Greenhorn wrote for the series, we got "The Lazarus Experiment", which looked more like the general public/lazy critics' version of Doctor Who than what usually happens. This is better than that, a bit, but it still has some major problems. Full marks for another alien planet, though, and a conflict between humans and the alien Hath who are occupying the same space. It's not exactly original, but it is the sort of thing we haven't seen nearly enough of as of late. It's also nice to have an alien species who aren't immediately hostile and/or evil and can, in fact, be reasoned with.

But the major problems with "The Doctor's Daughter" start early. The script and direction really want us to like Jenny, even though we're not given much of a reason to -- indeed, it's easier to side with the Doctor and his misgivings about how she has the knowledge of a soldier but not a Time Lord in her head. (Oh, and while we're here... Georgia Moffett is the daughter of fifth Doctor Peter Davison (real name Peter Moffett) -- so the title is both technobabble and an in-joke.) It doesn't help that we're not allowed to draw our own conclusions, forced instead to watch her do clever and amazing things and have that, it seems, be enough. Then there's the huge problem lurking at the center of this: the (superficially nifty) twist that the war has only been going on for one week. It's a nice idea, but if you think about it at all it falls apart rather spectacularly. It's not just the matter of General Cobb being played as someone far too old for this to work (which suggests that either he came out of the machine really old and they made him their leader, or that all these clones are subject to highly accelerated aging and they'll all be dead in a few days anyway -- or that he's been alive the entire week and just really hates the Hath), but that this idea requires the complete and total annihilation of something like twenty generations of soldiers in the space of a day or so (so that nothing but myths and legends survive). At the very least, what happens to all the bodies?

(There's also the matter of the Hath travelling with Martha who falls into some quicksand and dies, even though it's not breathing the outside air in the first place. To be fair, someone's realized this and placed a smashing glass sound over the shot, even though there's no good reason why the Hath's respirator would have been destroyed in the first place.)

On the plus side, many of the performances (particularly from the regulars) are very good. You can see the hurt and confusion on David Tennant's face as he grapples with this new "daughter" of his, and he does a great job of selling scenes like the one in the prison cell, where he talks a bit about the Time War, that don't actually provide us with any new information. The scene where he watches Jenny die, and then points a gun at Cobb's head, is also really powerful, and you get the impression that he might actually pull the trigger, even though he subsequently says he "never would". Catherine Tate is also good as the Doctor's foil, teasing him about becoming a father and working out what the dates mean (even if the description of this ("like it is in America") is strange, as Americans don't put the year first -- and why does Donna think the first two numbers in "60120724" are some sort of space date and not simply the 61st century?), and Freema Agyeman is great working with the Hath. Georgia Moffett also does the best she can with the material she's given, even though the script largely requires her to be doe-eyed and innocent, even when she's shooting at people.

But it's not enough. Despite some interesting bits here and there, there's a sense of tiredness about "The Doctor's Daughter", as if it's acceptable to go through the motions once they've come up with their plot twist. It even ends the way you might expect, with Jenny coming back to life (thanks to terraforming gas, though, not regenerative energy -- note the colors) and heading out into the universe for a sequel-hunting exit. Not that anyone has taken them up on this.¹⁹⁷ This is easily the weakest episode of this series so far, and generally not worth your time.

¹⁹⁷ All right, except for a brief appearance in IDW's Prisoners of Time comic book and a brief mention in the in-universe reference book The Doctor: His Lives and Times. That hardly counts, though.

March 18: "The Poison Sky"

So I remembered not being terribly impressed by this story, the first few times I watched it. This time around, though, I found myself reasonably entertained. It's not the greatest story out there, and it's not even necessarily anything more than an average tale, but then again it's not trying to be clever or inventive. No, what "The Sontaran Stratagem" / "The Poison Sky" wants to do is tell a fun action story that reintroduces the Sontarans, and at that it succeeds quite well.

Yes, there are some problems with "The Poison Sky" in particular. Luke Rattigan went from annoying to downright distasteful in this second part -- it's incredibly hard to have any sympathy for him even before he starts pulling guns on his students. You sort of get the impression that they want this to be like Tobias Vaughn getting his revenge on the Cybermen in The Invasion ("They destroyed my dream", if you remember), but Ryan Sampson is no Kevin Stoney. Not that that stops the episode from trying really hard to make you care about Rattigan and his fate. Oh, and speaking of strange things like this... why do the script and episode really want us to care about the death of Martha's clone? It's like they flip a switch from having her doing covert things for the Sontarans to suddenly being a real person dying in front of us. (Well, actually, dying in front of the real Martha, which makes it even stranger.) Never mind that she's been working for the enemy -- because she looks like someone we like, we should care. (Under this logic, some viewers are going to be very upset rewatching this episode and seeing Dan Starkey die just because he looks like Strax.) And some minor quibbles: it feels odd that the Sontarans are so vulnerable to bullets -- though admittedly, there's nothing in any of their previous appearances, to the best of my knowledge, to suggest they're not -- because you'd think that armor they're wearing would do something. And I wonder about a device that ignites the toxic gases in the atmosphere but not anything anywhere else. Or did a huge number of wildfires spring up in the American West (say) that we just don't hear about?

So those are the problems. But, balanced against this, we've got some great scenes in "The Poison Sky". It's great how the Doctor immediately works out that Martha is a clone, so that we don't have to worry too much about "oh no, there's a traitor in their midst" and can get on with business as usual. The Doctor gets to be nice and moral, objecting to guns ("If I see one more gun," he says as he casually disarms Luke and throws the gun away without missing a beat) and insisting that he give the Sontarans a choice between death and retreat, even though he knows they'll choose death. And while there aren't quite as many little jokes in this episode, there are still fun moments such as Donna sneaking out of the TARDIS to knock out a Sontaran guard, or her continual mispronunciations of the word "Sontaran", with emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second. (And this is an in-joke as well, reflecting conversations between Kevin Lindsay and director Alan Bromly about the pronunciation during the first Sontaran story, The Time Warrior.) It's also really lovely how Wilf is firmly on the Doctor's side, telling Donna to go with him over Sylvia's objections -- it's a nice change from family members being firmly anti-Doctor.

But ultimately this is a relatively uncomplicated action story, and while it's not doing anything spectacular, it's telling its tale in a largely entertaining way. As I said, it's not perfect (even if he's meant to be a prat, what were they thinking by including a character like Rattigan?), but it's definitely an improvement over Raynor's last tale.

And an interesting cliffhanger (the TARDIS suddenly takes off, with Martha still inside with the Doctor and Donna), and a very intriguing trailer for next time, as we meet... the Doctor's daughter?